By Jim Mcleod 
Dead Silence (2007), The Horror Film That Made Me
Picture this. The year is 2007. Ariana Grande is about to embark on her quest for world domination, Justin Bieber is posting videos on a relatively new website called YouTube, and Donald Trump is playing with his apprentices (also he’s on TV). As for me.
I’m in my teens and I think the Star Wars prequels are rubbish (because everyone thinks they’re rubbish) and I think The Simpsons isn’t funny anymore (because everyone thinks The Simpsons isn’t funny anymore) and I also think The Matrix sequels and Pirates of the Carribean sequels are terrible (because everyone else thinks they’re terrible) and that the new Alien vs Predator movie is the worst movie ever made (because the fans are saying it’s the worst movie ever made). Are you sensing a pattern here?
The thing is, I secretly thought the Star Wars prequels were awesome, and I hadn’t seen The Simpsons in years, and I really enjoyed the sequels to The Matrix and Pirates of the Carribean, and…actually…Alien vs Predator 2 really is one of the worst movies ever made.
My point is, even though I enjoyed (most of) these things, I assumed I was wrong and that everyone else was right. The pressure to conform and believe what everyone else believed was too much for my tiny teenage brain to resist.
And then I saw Dead Silence.
When it came out, everyone hated it. Even the people who made it hated it. It got rubbish reviews and hardly anyone bothered to go see it. I certainly didn’t go see it. I saw the reviews and I heard what everyone else was saying about it so I decided it was a terrible movie without even seeing the trailer.
Fast forward some years later. I’m home alone, it’s late at night, I’m channel hopping looking for something to watch…and I come across Dead Silence. It’s only just started and there’s nothing else on, so why not? It’s something to watch while I eat all the snacks and chug half a dozen bottles of fizzy.
But I soon forget the snacks and I only get halfway through the first bottle of fizzy because Dead Silence is everything I love about horror.
It’s dark and moody. It has a terrifying old lady. There’s a floating ghost chasing us. The terrifying old lady again. An outlandish twist no one could possibly see coming. An old lady that is terrifying. Freaky puppets with unsettling grins. And did I mention the terrifying old lady?
Okay, it’s not changing the genre or winning any awards, but I was hooked and reeled in and I’ve never since had an experience like it. I was expecting nothing and I got everything thrown at me.
All the reviews, all the talk, and all the negativity stopped me from watching something I ended up really enjoying.
To this day, I have not rewatched Dead Silence. And this is not because I’m too scared to watch it again. Well, not entirely, anyway. It’s mostly because I don’t want my memory of it spoiled. It was a perfect ghost story. Terrifying visuals, a weird story, and characters meeting horrific ends.
So why is Dead Silence the “film that made me”? There are better films out there and far better books. But Dead Silence taught me to ignore everyone else, to watch what I want to watch, to read what I want to read, and to enjoy what I find to be enjoyable.
And this is also why I write what I want to write, regardless of whether anyone actually ends up reading it.
Vampire Metropolis by Robin Brown
Hi, I’m Caiden, I look nineteen, but I’m actually a two-hundred-year-old vampire… and I’ve just been kicked out of a plane and dropped into a walled-off prison city for the world’s fantasy creatures. Welcome to Vampire City! A sprawling metropolis of segregated boroughs, desperate poverty and tyrannical vampire overlords who feed upon their lowly subjects to lay claim to them.
In my time here, I’ll work with a courageous leader of rag-tag elves, an ambitious warrior vampire looking to climb the heirarchy, street-wise goblins only after a quick buck, a hapless halfling who has found themselves up a certain creek without a certain paddle, and finally a young and headstrong vampire girl called Alma, who doesn’t feel like a vampire, and who incredibly can’t be fed upon by those tyrannical vampire overlords I mentioned earlier.
She might just be the key to changing this modern, run-down, unjust and cruel metropolis into a better place for everyone. Or she might not. Depends on what I do next, I suppose.
Robin Brown
Robin Brown is a potato in a top hat. His debut novel Vampire Metropolis is being released by Wild Ink Publishing and is out on April 22nd.
WEBSITE LINKS
https://www.instagram.com/rbrown_21_
Further Reading
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Sandra Ubege